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Gen X Has a Midlife Crisis

“We were stuck between meanings. Or we were the last dribbles of something. The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog. The beginning of aggressively marketed nachos.”

These are the ruminations of Milo Burke in the novel “The Ask,” summing up the formative experiences of his generation in a voice seemingly characteristic of that overeducated, insecure demographic cohort, who came of age in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Note the sudden swerve from world-historical grandiosity to consumerist banality; the attempt to camouflage sincere confusion with winking insouciance; the obsession with generalizing a personal experience.

A bit earlier in the same paragraph, Milo registers a nagging sense of that experience’s comparative inadequacy.

“Maybe not the glory of rushing a Nazi foxhole, or braving municipal billy bats to stop a war in Indochina,” he notes, trying to get a fix on what exactly he and his ilk achieved in their heroic youth, “but the privileged of our generation did what they could, like the rest of us.”

We did what we could: the slogan of the underachiever, the excuse maker, the loser. What they did, at least on the evidence of Milo’s testimony, was smoke weed, argue about Theory, sleep with one another’s girlfriends and boyfriends and wonder what was going to happen next.

What happened next is what always happens: these kids — slackers, Gen-Xers, take your pick of cringe-inducing monikers — grew up. Milo is in his early 40s, or so one surmises from his pop-cultural references and from the fact that the author, Sam Lipsyte, was born in 1968. He’s not a kid anymore: he’s a man of a certain age. And “The Ask” is, at least so far, the definitive literary treatment of a hugely important social phenomenon. Mr. Lipsyte, through the shambling, highly articulate and pathetic persona of Milo Burke, has announced the onset of the Generation X midlife crisis.

Photo

Credit
Matt Dorfman

The Gen X what? I wish I could inflect those paired pop-sociological clichés with the requisite irony, but my air-quote fingers are afflicted with incipient arthritis. The ridiculousness of the phrase is telling, though, since it registers the sense of absurdity, the innate nonseriousness, that has been this generation’s burden ever since the Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland christened us in his 1991 novel,
“Generation X,”
the title of which was inspired by the second-rate punk band that gave the world Billy Idol.

I see you rolling your eyes. That’s right, you: the one in the fake-vintage rock ’n’ roll T-shirt and thick-framed glasses reading this on an iPhone at the sidelines of your daughter’s soccer game. But you know exactly what I’m talking about, pal. (And by the way: stop trying to be a hip alterna-sports dad. Just cheer, for God’s sake.)

We grew up in the shadow of the baby boomers, who still manage, in their dotage, to commandeer disproportionate attention. Every time they hit a life cycle milestone it’s worth 10 magazine covers. When they retire, the Social Security system will go under! When they die, narcissism will be so much lonelier.

And when they were confronting the precipice of middle age, the boomers got the bittersweet balm of “The Big Chill.” What movie do we get?
“Hot Tub Time Machine.”
That may not be such a bad bargain, actually. The raunchy riffs and lowbrow gags of “Hot Tub” are vastly preferable to the navel-gazing sanctimony of “The Big Chill,” at least for my taste. But my taste may be suspect in this matter, since, give or take a few details, “Hot Tub Time Machine” is the story of my life.

Unless that was
“Greenberg,”
with Ben Stiller as a graying misanthrope who used to play in a rock band. But enough about me: Confession makes Gen-Xers uncomfortable, even though at least two-thirds of us have already written memoirs, or at least scribbled down a wry childhood reminiscence that we dream of reciting on “This American Life.” Editors of this paper (boomers again) frown on using the word “ironic” to describe this circumstance, so I’ll call it a contradiction, one of many that beset those of us born, for the sake of argument, between the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964) and the seizure of the United States Embassy in Tehran (1979).

The biggest contradiction may be: How can a generation whose cultural trademark is a refusal to grow up have a midlife crisis? It is a shock to see Mr. Stiller, in “Greenberg,” playing the older guy, just as it is an affront to Roger Greenberg himself to be the older guy. Returning home to Los Angeles after more than a decade in New York, Roger seems ludicrously and tragically confined in his own youth. He seeks out old friends and can’t quite accept that they’ve moved on, acquiring kids, spouses, ex-spouses, ordinary jobs and specific miseries that stand in notable contrast to Roger’s systemic resentment. “Youth is wasted on the young,” says Roger’s old friend Ivan. “I’d go further,” says Roger. “I’d go: Life is wasted on people.”

The sense that his life has been wasted — stalled by mysterious external forces rather than his own failure of will — makes Roger a representative figure, an epitome of loserdom instead of just another run-of-the-mill loser. It should go without saying that a generation is a demographic fiction, and that a stage of life is something of a literary conceit. But certain characters and narratives nonetheless draw together confused and disparate experiences in a way that feels almost instantly emblematic. Think of Dustin Hoffman in
“The Graduate,”
or Sarah Jessica Parker in the first seasons of
“Sex and the City.”

When markedly similar characters and stories start popping up everywhere, it’s more than a trend. It’s what those of us raised on vintage postmodernism call a historical phenomenon. So an intertextual analysis of “Greenberg,” “Hot Tub Time Machine” and “The Ask” (for starters) yields a startling composite portrait of the Gen X male in midlife crisis. Earlier versions of the crisis were, by and large, reactions against social norms. Members of the Greatest Generation and the one that came right after — the
“Mad Men”
guys, their wives and secretaries — settled down young into a world where the parameters of career and domesticity seemed fixed, and then proceeded, by the force of their own restlessness, to blow it all up.

This pattern repeated itself in the next decades, yielding variations on a story everyone seems to know. At a certain point, Dad buys a sports car, or starts a rock band, or has an affair or walks out on Mom or quits the law firm to make goat cheese. When this kind of thing happens to Mom, it’s not a crisis but an awakening. In any case, the driving impulse is to shake off the straitjacket of adulthood and find some way to feel young again.

But what if you never gave up adolescence in the first place? What if you donned the binding garment of maturity only tentatively, and accessorized it with mockery, as if it were a hand-me-down from Grandpa or an ugly shirt plucked from a used-clothing rack? And what if, from the start, your youthful rebelliousness had been a secondhand entitlement, without a clear adversary? These are the elements of Roger Greenberg’s predicament, which is shared by Milo Burke and the three 40-somethings who journey back to 1986 in “Hot Tub Time Machine.” They all seem stuck in an earlier phase of life, which wasn’t so great to begin with: Milo’s dorm room bull sessions and sexual escapades; Roger’s rock ’n’ roll dreams; that crazy time at the ski lodge with snow, cocaine, sex and spandex as far as the eye could see.

What follows that less-than-storied youth is regret, an intimation of lost possibilities that haunts everyone. There is, first of all, the squandered ambition, the professional road not taken. Milo, who was going to be the greatest painter of his time, slowly gave that up and ran aground in the world of nonprofit fund-raising. Roger balked at a record deal and lost his chance at success, just like Nick, the pet groomer in “Hot Tub Time Machine.” And then there are the former and potential girlfriends — the ones who got away but will never quite go away, tantalizing each sad-sack midlifer with visions of a bliss that might have been if he hadn’t screwed it up.

Other exemplary figures pop up repeatedly in these stories, most notably the successful friend (or, in Roger’s case, brother) who rubs your face in your own failure and the members of a younger generation on hand to do the same thing by different means. The climax of “Greenberg” comes at a party where Roger excoriates a bunch of Millennials — a bunch of 20-somethings — for the meanness that he believes is a byproduct of perfect parenting and manifests itself by a lack of reverence for Duran Duran. John Cusack expresses similar resentment in “Hot Tub” toward his character’s nephew, an inoffensive fellow, whose uncle sees him as a sexless, soulless video game addict. And Milo has Horace, an erstwhile co-worker and a more aggressive version of Milo himself, but with a virtuosity, scrambling cultural references and modes of diction that put Milo to shame. Horace is an iPod holding 10,000 songs on permanent shuffle, while Milo is a painstakingly assembled cassette mix tape.

There are variations on the story. In Judd Apatow’s
“Funny People,”
released last summer, Adam Sandler played a comedian-turned-movie star with the kind of money, toys and sexual opportunities that the dudes in the hot tub only dreamed of. But he had still not fully grown up, troubled by memories of lost love and premonitions of death, and also menaced by a rising, and somewhat better-adjusted, comic played by Seth Rogen.

That movie’s somewhat unstable blend of melancholy and humor was accompanied by an acute cognitive dissonance arising from the casting of Mr. Sandler. When did he, Mr. Stiller and Mr. Cusack — Lloyd Dobler! — become the older guys? And what do the rest of us have to show for aging along with them? That we saw
“Reality Bites”
or
“Say Anything”
when they first opened in theaters? That we once watched Mr. Sandler do Opera Man on “Saturday Night Live”?

Who cares? “If I were the protagonist of a book or a movie,” Milo says to his onetime boss, “it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, to like me, right?” The response is devastating: “I would never read a book like that, Milo, and I can’t think of anyone who would. There’s no reason for it.”

A lot of people seem to feel that way about “Greenberg,” which has done modest business and inspired a great deal of ambivalence among audiences. “Funny People” was a big flop, and “Hot Tub Time Machine” has not done nearly as well as
“The Hangover,”
which offers up coarse humor and male immaturity without the slightest attempt at historical perspective. Since its publication in March, “The Ask” has sold around 7,000 copies. Disappointing? Of course. Our generation wouldn’t have it any other way.

A version of this article appears in print on May 9, 2010, on Page WK1 of the New York edition with the headline: Gen X Has a Midlife Crisis. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe